The present invention generally relates to the design and analysis of integrated circuits and in particular, to a method for generating information for a window view of an integrated circuit from layout-formatted data.
During the design and analysis of an integrated circuit, it is useful at times to allow a remotely located party to view the layout of an integrated circuit as generated from layout-formatted data such as conventional GDSII formatted data. The rendering and transmission of such a view, however, can be very time consuming. As the remote party inspects the layout of the integrated circuit, the remote party also frequently desires to see various zoom-in window views of portions of the layout. To respond to such requests, a common practice is to re-render the entire integrated circuit layout from the layout formatted data before transmitting only the requested zoom-in window view. Needless to say, the long resulting wait for the requested window view can be extremely disheartening to the remote party in an interactive session.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method for generating information for a window view of an integrated circuit from layout-formatted data that is faster than conventional methods such as described above.
This and additional objects are accomplished by the various aspects of the present invention, wherein briefly stated, one aspect is a method for generating information for a window view of an integrated circuit from layout-formatted data, comprising: generating outer boundary boxes for structures of an integrated circuit from layout-formatted data; generating a build file by including information of a first group of the structures having areas greater than a threshold value and outer boundary boxes completely within a window; and generating information of a window view of the integrated circuit from the information thus included in the build file.
In another aspect, a method for generating information for a window view of an integrated circuit from layout-formatted data, comprises: generating outer boundary boxes for structures of an integrated circuit from layout-formatted data; generating a build file by including information of structures having outer boundary boxes completely within a window, excluding information of structures having outer boundary boxes completely outside the window, and clipping elements of structures having outer boundary boxes partially in and partially out of the window so that portions of the elements within the window are included in the build file and portions of the elements outside the window are excluded from the build file; and generating information of a window view of the integrated circuit from the information thus included in the build file.